(no subject)

[meanfreepath]

Why does Israel have to be put on the defensive internationally after its commandos use limited force in response to being attacked with potentially deadly weapons? Would anyone be complaining if the men and women of the US Navy were to use lethal force to defend themselves in the course of interdicting Somali pirates?

Comments

[arctangent.livejournal.com]

The Jews and the Romany didn't start in the same place and therefore comparing their endpoints seems like a bit of an unfair argument.

Is it your contention that if a homeland was cleared for the Romany people to live in and have their own nation-state that this would substantially reduce their problems to the point where the average Romany would now enjoy a standard of living comparable to the average Israeli? Because frankly I have a very hard time seeing how that happens.

*Especially* if the creation of the State of Rom in some historically appropriate location -- say, in their most likely area of origin, what is now modern-day Northern India and Pakistan -- involved forcibly displacing the many existing ethnic Indians living in the region, establishing the State of Rom as a "Western invader" within the Indian subcontinent and surrounding the State of Rom with hostility and violence for much of its history, requiring the Romany settlers to spend a tremendous percentage of their resources securing their position and making them a flashpoint of international controversy.

Seriously, I haven't crunched the numbers on this but I'd be very surprised if in pure economic terms Israel gives back more total to Jews outside Israel than Jews have put into it. The Romany, starting with far fewer resources, wouldn't have been able to even start making a go of it -- colonizing a hostile territory is a high-capital-barrier-to-entry enterprise.

And frankly I think the idea of "nationalism" as a shield in and of itself is kind of a fetishized idea within Western political discourse that isn't really true. There is a certain psychological safety that comes with thinking "We have our own country which is ours where we make the laws and we raise the taxes and we command the military", but does that actually make Jews safer? If the paranoid fantasy came true and the Holocaust reignited tomorrow and, as the angriest Zionists claim is always on the brink of happening, the Christian West and the Muslim Mideast united to stomp out Judaism forever, would Israel really be an impregnable fortress of protection or just a convenient target for a first strike? (Remember that we're talking a fantasy where the United States jumps on the anti-Semitic bandwagon -- the possibility of this is the primary justification for why a specifically Jewish state was necessary and just going to America was not a solution. How long does Israel hold out against the *entire world* if the USA isn't at its back?)

And, see, if we're not talking about that specific counterfactual -- the *entire world* turning against Israel -- then what we're talking about Israel protecting people from is largely protecting them from problems created by Israel's presence and geographical location in the first place. If we're not talking about the EU becoming a new Third Reich, then the threats against Jews we're talking about come from Muslim suicide bombers and whatnot -- Muslims suicide bombers who are only there to bomb Jewish people because the Jewish people are in the Middle East, and whose primary motivation for doing so is the existence of the state of Israel in the Middle East. (Yes, a convenient motivation often stirred up by politicians to distract people from their own internal problems -- so?)

[rose_garden.livejournal.com]

If we're not talking about the EU becoming a new Third Reich, then the threats against Jews we're talking about come from Muslim suicide bombers and whatnot

I thought the Big Scary Threat (tm) these days was Iran nuking Israel.

[sildra.livejournal.com]

Last time I was there--last summer--Israel was far more afraid of the Pakistani government collapsing and having tribal anarchy with preexisting nukes than they were of Iran developing nukes and deciding it would be worthwhile to bomb Israel.

[sildra.livejournal.com]

You start talking about a fantasy where there's a second Holocaust; people of my grandparents' generation were afraid of that and saw Israel as the solution, but I certainly don't. I will point out, for the millionth time, that I am, in a sense, in hiding from the Israeli government because I don't want citizenship--it has no upsides and many downsides for me. If a second Holocaust looked like it was about to happen, the safest thing I've ever been able to think of to do would be to hide in the jungles of Central America. Which isn't a great option, either.

What Israel provided was place for a whole generation of orphan teenagers and 20-somethings with no education to get back on their feet. The Romany didn't have that, and still continue to live in shanty towns and refugee camps. It doesn't matter much that the starting point was different--that the Jewish homeless, uneducated teenagers' now-deceased parents were largely middle class, while the Romany homeless, uneducated teenagers' now-deceased parents were mostly poor.